Chapter the Twenty-Second: In Which a Salute Costs Less Than a Benefits Claim
On the Distinction Between Honoring the Dead and Inconveniencing the Living
There is a species of debt that a creditor is assured, loudly and with great solemnity, can never be repaid — and which is therefore, almost by logical necessity, never seriously attempted.
A senator from Iowa, standing over the names of six soldiers killed in a drone strike in Kuwait, said exactly this last week. “Our nation owes them an incredible debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.” She is, by all accounts, a person of genuine conviction who served in uniform herself. And yet — the word never is doing considerable work in that sentence, and one suspects it was not chosen carelessly. A debt declared beyond settlement is a debt whose creditors have been very efficiently managed.
Six soldiers were killed in a drone strike on a command center in Kuwait one day after the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran. Their remains were returned to Dover Air Force Base on Saturday, March 7. The president attended. He stood silently and saluted as each flag-draped transfer case was carried from the aircraft.
This is not nothing. The dignified transfer is, genuinely, a solemn thing. The ritual has its own integrity — the 24-hour watch, the officer who never leaves the body, the uniform buttons repolished before the casket is sealed. Whatever one thinks of the decisions that made the ritual necessary, the ritual itself asks something real of those who witness it.
What it does not ask — what it is designed, by its nature, never to ask — is a question about the living.
The dead soldier is the nation’s most comfortable patriot. He requires no healthcare. He will not file a disability claim, or struggle to access a VA appointment, or call a crisis line that has been quietly understaffed. He will not need a job, or a pension processor, or a psychologist who specializes in traumatic brain injury. He will not constitute a burden of any administrative complexity. He has, in the most literal possible sense, been honorably discharged from all further demands on the public.
The living veteran is considerably more inconvenient. Between January and December of 2025, the administration cut nearly 28,000 VA employees — roughly six percent of the agency’s staff — in what amounted to the largest single-year staffing decline in the department’s history. Among those cut were over 2,700 nurses, more than 1,000 medical officers, more than 1,000 psychologists and social workers, and over 1,800 people specifically tasked with evaluating veterans’ disability claims. The Veterans Crisis Line — serving veterans at risk of suicide — lost employees to layoffs despite existing staffing shortages.
One salutes at Dover. One does not staff the crisis line. These are, apparently, different categories of honoring.
There is a bumper sticker — you have seen it, you will see it again — that instructs the observer to support our troops. It asks nothing further. It specifies no mechanism. It does not describe what support might look like in practice, nor does it suggest that such support might require anything beyond the adhesive application of sentiment to a vehicle’s rear panel. This is, one suspects, the point. The sticker is not a policy. It is an absolution. It permits the display of feeling without the inconvenience of expenditure.
Ceremony operates similarly. After the dignified transfer was completed, the president told reporters that the war was going “unbelievably” and “as good as it can be.” He then returned to his estate in Florida. The soldiers’ families returned to wherever soldiers’ families return to — which is to say, into a country that had just spent twelve months firing the people who process their paperwork.
The optics of a salute are, one must concede, very good. The optics of a fully staffed VA claims office are not photogenic in any comparable way. No cameras attend the moment a benefits processor does not answer the phone. No senator delivers remarks over a delayed appointment.
This is the architecture of performative patriotism, and it has been under continuous refinement for as long as there have been wars to fight and elections to win: the sacrifice of soldiers elevated to the status of abstraction, the support of veterans demoted to line item. The former costs nothing but presence and appropriate affect. The latter costs money and attention and institutional competence — the very things most easily eliminated when one is in the business of cutting things.
It is a system of considerable elegance. The soldier who dies becomes a symbol, and symbols require no follow-through. The soldier who survives becomes a veteran, and veterans require a budget.
Our nation owes them a debt that can never be repaid
She may be right. Certainly the nation has taken considerable pains to ensure it.
The most efficient way to honor a sacrifice is to ensure that it cannot come back and present a bill.